Film Music Analysis and Pedagogy. David Neumeyer

Film Music Analysis and Pedagogy David Neumeyer

The ubiquitous videocassette gives us, for the first time, a convenient way to examine films and their music closely. Many classic films are available, especially in VHS format, and, thanks to cable stations, more films of all eras and genres are being shown on television than ever.1 Since music has been an important element in the medium from its earliest days, it follows that now we have the opportunity to invoke film scores routinely as audio-visual aids in the teaching of music and to treat them as another repertoire of twentieth-century music subject to scholarly study. Videocassettes, to be sure, have some disadvantages: rewind/fast-forward mechanisms are slow; dubbing from a video1Readers should be aware of some complications due to copyright laws, which are just as confusing for video as they are for music. It is legal to dub copies from television for personal use, but it is not legal to show these "fair copies" to a class. An instructor may show a legally owned or rented videotape to a class, but a student may not. Furthermore, the showing must be "private" (for the class only). Copyright holders are apparently especially sensitive to this issue of "public" screenings of films. None of this applies, of course, to American films now coming out of copyright (in general, those released in 1933 and earlier-but be careful of silent films reconstructed or re-released with new music accompaniments) and it may not apply to certain films released later but whose copyrights were allowed to lapse, the most famous example being It 's A Wonderful Life (1947).

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1991 Indiana

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Indiana Theory Review Vol. 11

cassette results in significant loss of image quality, even on good machines; TV monitors lose the edges of the image (more on the sides than on top or bottom); and videotapes tend to "flatten" or "muddy" black and white images with a wide range of gray tones, and color images generally. Add to

Bibliography: of Music for Film and Television. (Detroit: Information Coordinators, 1987); Gillian Anderson, Music for Silent Films 1894-1929: A Guide. Washington: Library of Congress, 1988; Fred Steiner and Martin Marks, in The New Groves Dictionary of American Music, s.v. "Film Music"; and annotations in Gorbman, 177 ff. Students exploring the film musical will do well to begin with Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1982); Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, JJ 26 Indiana Theory Review Vol. 11 takes the definition of "analysis" prevalent among music theorists for the past thirty years or so, then the literature is very small indeed, restricted to work-analysis limited in both tools and agenda: the analyst is obliged to privilege the integration of small-scale and large-scale features of pitch and, sometimes, rhythmic organization while choosing from a "canonic set" of analytic methods or systems, or at least a carefully argued variant of one of them. Of all the texts I have read, only one-Alfred Cochran 's dissertation--could hope to meet such a restricted definition, and even Cochran 's analytic methodology is more eclectic than closely focused. To be fair to the discipline of music theory, current debates about the nature, function, and contexts of musical analysis are already expanding the limits of method beyond such severe constraints ' and would permit us to include in our "short list" of film-music analyses texts by those writers who show the most sustained interest in problems of music 's role in film narrative: among others, Graham Bruce, Claudia Gorbman, and Kathryn Kalinak. 32 And, from the standpoint of music theory, one might complain that the published film-music literature in general lacks evidence of sophisticated interpretation of the musical materials and shows little if any recognition of current music-theoretical tools. For example, although the literature is heavy on discussion of melodic/motivic features, no one has taken advantage even of the merely relative formality of Leonard Meyer 's melodic archetypes (not to mention voice-leading and other schemata discussed by Meyer and Robert Gjerdingen). 1989). 32See chapters in the books by Bruce and Gorbman. Kathryn Kalinak 's articles are the clearest models for students writing traditional essays about film music for the first time ("Max Steiner and the Classic ... " in Film Music 1; "The Text of Music: A Study of The Magnificent Ambersons," Cinema Journal 27 [1988]: 45-63). If they are accessible, students should also consult two cue-by-cue analyses by Fred Steiner: "Herrmann 's 'Black and White ' Music for Hitchcock 's Psycho," Film Music Notebook III (1974): 28-36 and I12: 26-46; "An Examination of Leith Stevens ' Use of Jazz in The Wild One," Film Music Notebook II/2 (1976): 26-35. Neumeyer, Film Music Analysis and Pedagogy 27 Finally, one has to admit that film is an inhospitable environment for analytic methods which were designed for concert music and whose underlying aesthetic values have their source in high modernism, fifties ' scientism, and sixties ' structuralism. Serious reinterpretation is required to make these tools fit for use in an art where authorship is often in doubt, where contexts constantly point outside the musical materials and their "internal" processes, and where music is rarely continuous and is only one element-usually a subservient one-among several. Still, one might reasonably suppose that recent phenomenological models for musical analysis, the revivified expressivist-hermeneutic model, and a musical semiotics could all find the medium congenial. And film music is far easier to work with than, say, music of other cultures, where system, technique, and social context are often radically different-film music is, by and large, the music of the European tradition set in a different aesthetic context. Thus opportunities are near at hand to expand the range of closely articulated musical understandings.